Complain About Being Bored At Work? FORGETABOUTIT!

In a job where an incident is always waiting to happen, a boring night is not something to complain about. I’ve always said all these years that boring is good because that means none of the patients are acting out.

Acting out in this kind of work could mean: getting into an argument with another patient which could result in threatening to beat each other up. Oftentimes the argument would be about totally unrelated subjects since some these patients are paranoid and others have auditory and visual hallucinations, so what they hear and see may not be what the other patient said or did. And then there are the yellers whose voices are so loud and piercing and when this happens in the middle of the night, it’s worse because it tends to wake the other patients up whom you also have to placate.

Right at this moment we just admitted a patient who is saying that she cannot go back and stay in her room because it is possessed. Just when I was typing that, the patient tried to follow a staff member out the door in an attempt to escape. It’s turning out to be one of those nights because earlier we had another runner who tried the same thing.

Another type of acting out behavior is when a patient threatens to hurt the staff or starts hitting the walls or throwing furniture because he or she isn’t getting the medication he or she wants. Usually they just yell or scream until they get what they want. A lot of these patients know more about the medications they are taking than the staff does because they are addicted to those meds.

Just last week we started the evening so peacefully that I mentioned to my co-worker that it was unusually quiet. Not more than an hour later two roommates tried to beat the hell out of each other because one of them woke up the other to tell him that it was medication time. No one actually made physical contact but to avoid further conflict we had to move one of them to another room.

One of the reasons why a patient starts acting out is the perceived lack of food. Some of these patients seem insatiable despite giving them whatever available food we have on hand and when we run out, we get accused of hiding hospital food from them. Others have restricted diets so we can’t give them the amount of food they want.

Another source of patient anxiety is the nicotine fit. We only have five scheduled smoke breaks all day and none after 9:30 in the evening, so if someone had the craving to smoke, we are unable to accommodate him or her and some would throw a hissy fit or a temper tantrum in an attempt to get what they want.

I wish I could list all the instances of patients acting out but there are so many of them and they come in different variations. It’s truly an interesting and challenging but stressful job. Sometimes you wish for a lot more boring nights.